Chinese Restaurants and Neighborhood Change in New York City

This article analyzes the relationship between the presence of Chinese restaurants and neighborhood change in New York City. The core metric used for analysis in this article is a Chinese restaurant index, which is a transformed and scaled percentage of restaurants in a neighborhood that can be classified as Chinese. As an inexpensive and plentiful dining option, Chinese restaurants have an association with working-class neighborhoods, and neighborhood-level Chinese restaurant index decreases over time were associated with gentrification in New York City. This methodology further demonstrates the potential for the use of retail-based analysis as a supplement to conventional gentrification metrics based on demographic and real estate data.